The MTA and GTFS

Just today I found about GTFS, a standardized data format from Google for describing public transit schedules.  I subsequently discovered that the MTA has a GTFS feed.

Back when I didn’t have a car, I used the MTA daily and had a set of scripts to extract their schedule data from the website and import it into trainsched on my Palm Pilot.  I asked them for more structured data at one point but was rebuffed, so I stuck with my scripts that had to be updated every time they changed their schedule pages.

I don’t have a Palm Pilot any more (and trainsched doesn’t even run on the PalmOS emulator on my WebOS phone), but I thought it would be nice to update my old scripts to use the new GTFS feeds.  This should even work with other GTFS feeds; there’s nothing really MTA-specific going on.

The updated scripts are here: GTFS to trainsched converter.